History Matters Quotes

“I have often thought and said that the digital watch is the perfect symbol of our time. It only tells you what time it is now as if there had been no time before and no time to come.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“is not in mortals to command success, but we’ll do more, we’ll deserve it.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“Try to keep in mind that everyone you encounter along the way, no matter their background or station in life, knows something you don’t.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“The Golden Gate Bridge was built when Franklin Roosevelt was in his first term. It was built in the era of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. It was built at the time of the Berlin Olympics. Built at the time of the abdication of the King of England for “the woman I love.” Built during the Great Depression. And built during a period when two of the most important events of the twentieth century took place, foretelling everything that has so changed in our world. Two events that took place not much more than one hundred miles apart. One, in Copenhagen, where Niels Bohr and his colleagues at the Institute for Theoretical Physics determined that if the uranium atom were split, it would release a power beyond any previous understanding or example. And just across the way at a small German fishing village, the Nazi government had instituted the first rocket experimental station under the young, brilliant physicist Wernher von Braun.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“I’m convinced that history encourages, as nothing else does, a sense of proportion about life, gives us a sense of the relative scale of our own brief time on earth and how valuable that is.”
― David McCullough, History Matters

“The only thing new in the world, Harry Truman once remarked, was the history we don’t know.”
― David McCullough, History Matters